Layover

  Dr. Talliver’s business card was not in my briefcase, but on the bureau back at the hotel. He was, however, listed. I called his office, left a message that it was an emergency and that he should call me back at—but Michael Davidoff’s phone number was not printed on the phone, as in the good old days. Nor was home phone listed. Nor did I think they were likely to give it to me at his office. But I was a clever girl. Called Bell Tel and got, after a series of volleys, the mechanism to obtain this information. #958, for future reference, gets you a computer, an emotionless crew member from the Good Ship Galactorrhea, reciting the phone number from which you just dialed. Called back Talliver, gave it to his secretary, as well as room number at Four Seasons.

  Then called my OB-GYN in Cleveland. Told the secretary it was an emergency.

  Friday is not the best day to get cancer. Friday is not the best day to do anything that involves the Helping Professions. Patients imagine the cruel doctors lolling about in golf carts. In fact the problem with weekends is the low-level folk—X-ray technicians, blood-test processors, even data-entry clerks who need to type in the insurance information in order to process the blood samples—whose Fridays start, generally, by lunch on Thursday. A Friday in summer, in August: forget it. I knew this. It is, of course, a little better in a town the size of Cleveland than in Manhattan, where all tissue samples from breast aspirations, from questionable mammograms, are taken on Friday mornings, so that women can wait until Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning, sometimes even later for results. A marathon straight fifty, sixty, seventy hours of not knowing whether you will continue being able to see your husband and children, of envisioning the cancer in you as a hairy fist or as greenish, long-toothed and slavering, something from Alien.

  Could not, for the life of me, even remember where the pituitary gland was. Was not carrying a Gray’s Anatomy.

  Found Michael’s dictionary, looked it up. While I was at it looked up galactorrhea, which had not made it into the American Heritage, but the etymology became obvious as I searched: galaxy. Milky way. All we know of heaven we learn at the breast.

  9:20 AM.

  The University of Pennsylvania’s medical library was a short cab ride away. Even closer, my computer: I could hook into the on-line medical library at work, check out the latest research. But none of this would tell me a thing. I needed a blood workup, pronto, and I would sit right here until one was scheduled.

  Nothing so awful as waiting to hear from doctors. I’ve sat through many casual conversations about what kind of death one prefers, hypothetically: instantaneous or delicately degenerative. As if one is given a choice. Everyone always picks heart attack over the slow, ugly ravaging. I wouldn’t argue, even as someone who lost a child that way, in a lightning bolt. In neither scenario, though, do you know. That’s the problem. The perfect death would be the one where you know in advance exactly when you will vanish in a flash. You could pick a date, say a Saturday in late May. A suitable engagement, then the ceremony.

  Instead of going into a waiting-for-doctors fugue, I tried to feel, in Michael’s apartment, like I was inhabiting that enervating point in a courtship in which nothing between you has been decided, but things aren’t really fresh either. You wake up at his place and your own place—mail, fresh clothes, different lipstick color—beckons. This conceit made me feel almost nostalgic for my nice clean room at the Four Seasons. I went so far as to call the hotel, see if they could release my voice-mail messages, but they had no mechanism to do that by remote.

  Why was I paying for a hotel, if I planned to stay with Michael? It only made me traceable. Did I, or did I not, want Ken to come? For Ken to make management open my door, find the bed unslept in, go to the police—all that seemed unnecessarily cruel. I really needed to call him, once I heard from the doctor, because I did not, of course, want the doctor to call and find the phone busy.

  9:45.

  Efforts to calm down with cable movies were equally ineffective. On one of Michael’s premium channels, humorless Mafia hits, and on the other, a psychopath whose jollies were derived from burying victims alive. Being buried alive is no one’s fantasy of the ideal death. I did not need to contemplate, currently, what I would do when I found myself awake in the inescapable dark of the coffin. The best I could come up with was to masturbate. Use up what was left of my oxygen with some heavy breathing, go out with a bang.

  It was that train of thought that set me out to search for Michael’s promised collection of pornographic movies. They were not, as Zachary had promised, prominently and proudly displayed. But they were not that hard to find, either. There were only a couple of the lesbo-fantasies that Zachary had foretold, but who knows, maybe Dad’s tastes had evolved, for most of these (by no means a hundred, but more than several) were instructional numbers, focused on technique as if on golf swing. So I’d called that one right too; he’d studied both law and sex. I popped in The Secrets of Tantric Love and sat unmoved, in my suit, as a duo deep-kissed in close-ups that let you study their fillings, then made sensuous Love, to what sounded like elevator Muzak, so slowly that I had to roll my eyes, reach for the remote. Fast-forwarding through Tantric sex: now there was a mantra for our troubled times. (10:00.) The men all wore condoms. I didn’t remember that, from porn-days of yore. A new couple was trotted out—I seemed to have flipped right past the last set’s climax, if in fact Tantric sex permitted climax—featuring a bearded fellow who had a much stronger, more flexible back than any male with whom I had ever been personally associated, for he seemed to have no trouble standing, leaning backward at a forty-five-degree angle while hefting up a full-grown woman, and then rotating her whole body in dreamy circles, like some slo-mo rodeo roper, for about three or four years, during which, every so often, she moaned encouragingly.

  10:15.

  With her chirping as background I plugged in my computer, called up the file where I’d been keeping track of my menstrual periods such as they were, and neatly transcribed the numbers, so when my OB-GYN called and asked for them, I’d be ready for him.

  When was your last period? Depends on what you’re calling a period.

  Like most women, I had fallen a little in love with my OB-GYN, after the delivery. Hard not to fall in love with a man brave enough to look into that gory mess. He had spoken to me musingly about the indignities of HMO bill-processing procedures while he stitched up my episiotomy, attentive to detail as a lace-tatter. He was short, like many GYNs—some almost Toulouse-Lautrec height, scaled to practically stand eye-level between the stirrups. (The tall, strong guys, like my husband, are mostly orthopedic surgeons.) Short and sweet. He would not, I trusted, keep me waiting long on an emergency long-distance call, and I was right. I picked up on the first ring before Tantric Love was over, if it would ever be over. We got the small-talk quickly out of the way—yes, away on business, might be away for a while—and I filled him in on my preliminary diagnosis.

  “Very good!” he said. “Been crammin’ from your Merck?”

  “’Course.”

  “Any other symptoms?”

  “Tired. I thought I might be pregnant, until I thought I might be amenorrheic.”

  We trotted through my computer-generated calendar of blood arrival. He was not satisfied with my bookkeeping. I had neglected to record length, so that it was hard to tell what was period, what was spotting. “Any nausea, breast tenderness?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Decreased libido?”

  “Increased, if anything.”

  “Are you—hairier anywhere?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Any mustache, hair on your chest? Hirsute at all?”

  I laughed. He was using the very adjective from Merck’s, to describe symptoms of Cushing’s disease. “No,” I said, “and my face isn’t round, either.”

  He laughed back. Nothing like a good chuckle with your MD.

  “Not to worry,” he assured me. “The adenoma is a common problem. No biggie. Ten percent of the population, by
some estimates, has it, if in fact that’s what you have and given your commuting schedule, and all the other—well, it ain’t necessarily so. Gotta run the numbers. Galactorrhea can occur spontaneously. If you and Ken have an athletic session of—I mean, if you have to squeeze, it’s not necessarily symptomatic.”

  So the Wilkes-Barre pincher might, in fact, have caused onset.

  “You know anyone around these parts?” I asked him. “Any school chums who would see me quick? I’d like to get a prolactin reading. Today, say.”

  “No hurry. Just call when you get home. Set you right up.”

  “Don’t know when I’ll be home and would like to know, actually. I mean my understanding is that the Bromocriptine—”

  “Dostinex now,” he corrected. “Big improvement since the Dostinex is twice a week versus twice a day on the other.”

  “My understanding is that it increases chances of fertility.”

  “Sure, but you’re putting the cart before the horse.”

  “All I want is the blood test.”

  “Well, no one’s gonna see you there over this. Not like it’s serious. But it’s a special test. You’ve got to have fasted the night before, no intercourse, no breast exam. And if the levels indicate—odds are it’s nothing, Claire, but do you really want to have an MRI there, by yourself? And in Philly—well, for nonemergency, you’d probably wait two weeks there for an MRI.”

  I realized that an MRI by myself was exactly what I wanted, but it would be hard to explain this to him.

  If I wanted something to do, he suggested, I could go buy myself a home pregnancy kit. That at least would settle that. Did I want to talk to Amy, make an appointment right away?

  I dutifully made the appointment for the middle of the next week, but it was clear to me I would have to ascertain my condition before I went home. I would have been hard-pressed to explain why, but I did feel quite sure that I should know before I returned to Ken. To see a doctor here, I would have to lie. That shouldn’t be much of a problem; I’d lied to everyone else. Meanwhile it was almost lunchtime, on a Friday. No way was anything happening today, even if Talliver magically returned my call and set me right up with a local OB-GYN, because my big night of love had evidently obviated my chances for a clean blood test. Nothing was happening until Monday, which meant that I would be encoffined into a whole weekend of uncertainty. A weekend like an MRI—that claustrophobic and scary.

  For a Monday morning blood test, I would have to make arrangements at once. But I had no doctor’s name and was not about to proceed alphabetically through the GYNs in the Yellow Pages, despite the fact that any halfwit could oversee a blood test. So I went back to sleep and dreamed about traveling the quarter-mile to the Four Seasons, to check my messages and sleep in what I had begun to think of as my own bed.

  In my dreams, Ken appeared to be waiting in the lobby, agitated. Thus I knew I was dreaming, because staking out a lobby was not Ken’s style. There would be mail, though. Federal Express. A barely legible note on one of his freebie pads advertising new drugs: LOVE YOU

  Just not quite enough to lavish on me a personal pronoun, or punctuation.

  Asleep, I decided that if the Federal Express envelope from Kenneth Leithauser contains a note not scribbled on a drug company pad, and he managed to use the personal pronoun, and he filled out the FedEx form himself, in his own handwriting, rather than have his secretary type it and arrange pickup, I would go home today. Then a backup plan: even if there is no Federal Express envelope from Kenneth Leithauser, I will call him, put his mind at ease.

  I’m surprised when he answers the phone at home, at lunch-time. He has somehow managed to have calls transferred from the home phone to the cell phone. Answers from surgery. Can you hold on? As through a conch, the whoosh of distant water. I imagine the bloody thumbprint on the cell phone. Where did he put the phone during surgery, on the tray with the instruments? Who is minding the cracked-open ribs of the patient in question while Ken says Claire? That you? I’d always loved the deep yet easy timbre of Ken’s voice. Asleep, I muscled into his voice as if hurling my head into his neck, taking strength from the brute fact of marriage—years crosshatched and accreting like lath on a joist. I miss you! Could say just that on the answering machine.

  But I did not go to the hotel or call. I merely slept or half-slept, with things coming at me in threes:

  Galactorrhea

  Amenorrhea

  Pituitary Microadenoma

  Hillary

  Kenneth

  Michael

  Michael

  Zachary

  Margot

  Defective heart

  Defective car seat

  Shitty driver

  Michael

  Kenneth

  Me—

  a list that ended, somehow, in summer camp, my son (so tall!) the only thing to emerge from the confusion whole and alone, except that with his ponytail he also seemed to be Zachary, Michael Davidoff and I his parents; and Hillary Katzenbach seemed to have died in a car accident in Puerto Vallarta; and Hillary Katzenbach and Michael Davidoff seemed to have met (in a fender-bender?) and married, leaving me to seek out the poet Michael to console him, and fall in love with him, and help him raise his children, and allow him to express, in verse, the nature of my grief.

  The hotel room at the Four Seasons now loomed totemic, like the rental car parked in the Children’s Hospital garage: a lost thing, shadowy and incomplete. Presumably the room was still being kept for me. I could touch base with the people at what I’d begun to think of as the Desk, as if it were the CIA, or the Politburo. My black suitcase was still in that room. Again I had to demand of myself: who cared? Insurance would cover it, my employer would replace it in a flash, and anyhow, I was a surgeon’s wife. The only valuable thing in my life was my life. Even if it was only sentimental value.

  When Michael Davidoff returned from work, with several bags of odiferous Thai take-out, I had been asleep all afternoon, and he had been awake for almost two days. He was not sure, he announced, that he could even stay awake through dinner, no less for—and here he grinned, holding up the box from my recent viewing pleasure—anything Tantric. But he planned to try, he said. Fortify himself with some Pad Thai, give it his best shot. And how, he wanted to know—he was still standing beside the bed, holding brown paper bags—were Elsie’s famous leaky teats?

  I sat up. “You don’t happen to know a good OB-GYN in the city by any chance?” I asked.

  “Sure do,” he said. “Don’t move. Wait a minute.”

  I was foggy enough to think that, when he left the room, he would return with a doctor. But he was, in fact, just putting down the take-out bags. Then he approached to rip his down quilt off me.

  I had known him only two days but this gesture—yanking back covers decisive as a toreador, or as a waiter wielding a fresh tablecloth—was already overfamiliar. And a poor fit for the delicacy of his sexual moves. Subtlety covering brashness, the brashness something about which he felt both pride and shame: therein, I suspected, lay his secret, such as it was. If we trotted through family genealogy, curriculum vitae, old flames, and old failures, I would understand.

  He had in mind, presumably, the contrast of my naked, sleep-warmed flesh against his suit. Except I was in my suit too. I had never managed to get undressed. The suit just dry-cleaned, too. We both smiled at the idiocy of this. He bent to kiss, for some reason, in the vicinity of my belly button, at an angle that made his tie swish pubically, like some kind of French tickler.

  I pushed him away. “No sex, I’m afraid,” I explained. “Messes up the blood test I’m hoping to have soon. Like, tomorrow. Know a doctor you can pull strings with?”

  “After dinner,” he assured me.

  “No food for me either. Got to fast.”

  He grinned. “Well, this promises to be a fun weekend,” he said. “All-rightee. No sex. How ’bout if I just—”

  But I grabbed his hand. “This has to be the part where we, retros
pectively, ‘get to know each other.’”

  He did a lawyer’s gesture of doleful acquiescence. But I could tell he was too tired to be as disappointed as he thought he should act. In fact, I could tell he was as puzzled about why I was there as I was myself.

  Michael had in mind for me for the blood test, he told me as he ate, a Dr. Sharon Rieff, who sometimes testified for him in cases involving unnecessary or botched surgery, and complications during delivery. He had known her for years, well enough, it seems, to beep her on a Friday night to arrange an impromptu look-see for a friend. “Ohio,” he said, smiling at me reassuringly. “Yeah. I know. But.” From tone alone, from just those lines, I could tell that Michael and the doctor had once been lovers or maybe were still, although their relationship seemed awfully tension-free for people currently entangled.

  No food, no sex, Dr. Sharon Rieff reminded me. “No other drugs, obviously. Furthermore, since M.D. will undoubtedly ask, nothing sexlike. By which I mean, if you’ve got symptoms of galactorrhea, give the breasts a rest.”

  That established, it was time for Michael and me to chat. Where were we from? Where did we go to college? Did we have brothers and sisters? How did I get into medical sales? Where did Ken and I meet? How did I feel about Jewish men, how did Michael feel about shiksas like me? Why had he never remarried? Was he seeing anyone seriously? How old were we, our first times? How many times, total, in our lives? How many times married?

  Staggering, the number of things you’d need to know to make even a superficial profile. Easier to think I knew something without all that, merely from observing the speculative way he squiggled the remains of his shrimp tails and bean sprouts around on his plate. All of personality encoded in the gesture.

  He was too tired for much inquiry, although I did manage to get out of him that he and Dr. Rieff “had a thing, once.” She was not the current object of affection, about whom he was properly circumspect. I watched him eat, then watched him sleep. Hard to think it was totally meaningless, as ships that pass in the night, that we had managed to get ourselves, for our one weekend together, on such radically different schedules. I watched the clock, watched bad TV, and slept a bit, fitfully. All of my energy was focused now on the gleaming needle that would bring me answers.